PACS Intelligent Routing

Intelligent routing for Diagnostic Imaging was initially used to facilitate DICOM Data migrations by managing the continued accumulation of studies that are acquired after a migration is started. These studies need to be retrieved by the migration server (often from the source PACS’ archive) and loaded into its cache, which can be time consuming and risky, especially considering service issues that can be encountered on the source PACS. So the idea of proactively diverting a copy of these studies directly to a migration server by employing intelligent routing addresses the problem of having to retrieve them from the Source PACS.

Intelligent routing has since taken on a more diversified significance than just reducing overall DICOM Data Migration effort. Data and images need to be accessed and/or shared in a variety of complex environments: multi-site healthcare operations (across disparate vendor systems), off-site staffing & collaboration requirements and archiving trends (Vendor Neural Archive), which serves a broader set of interests beyond a departmental PACS.

MDI Solutions has developed a highly-specialized set of routing tools to manage standard DICOM migrations, which also responds very well to advanced and ad-hoc routing requirements for all known DICOM destinations. Their expert team has experience moving data and images between all major PACS vendor systems.

The following are some typical use cases that address these trends and benefits:

Migrate to more than one physical location; a study acquired at one site can be identified by modality and forwarded to multiple sites dynamically

Dynamically route details based in a study’s DICOM Tag – most often additional routing decisions are made based upon study type (CT/MR) or Ordering Physician

Route based on system time or time windows, for example: Mondays after 6PM a copy of a study gets routed to destination A, but the 3rd Monday of a month after 6 PM an additional copy is routed to Destination B as well as Destination A

Apply study modification rules, for example: append a study identifier (like an accession number) to identify the source of a study when there is a risk of duplication, or add an institution name to provide additional distinction in scenarios where studies may be pooled with objects from other DICOM and Non DICOM sources.